‘GomBurZa’ fanned the flames

There is something empowering about churchmen and women being martyred not only for their faith but also for sowing seeds of dissent against injustice and oppression which, in fact, is an imperative dictated by their very own Christian faith, and not accepted by the powers-that-be who might be threatened by it.

“GomBurZa,” the movie (Jesuit Communications, MQuest Ventures, CMB Film Services), is a brave undertaking, crashing right into the Metro Manila Film Festival with other wannabe blockbusters at Christmastide. The movie was written and directed by Jose Lorenzo “Pepe” Diokno III. (Son of Chel, so you know.) I did brave the Christmas Day mall crowd in SM North to have first crack at it. With great resolve, I sliced my way through the horrendous throng as though I was parting the Red Sea. I got one of the good seats before all seats were taken. The theater was full!

“GomBurZa,” as I learned in grade school, stands for Gomes, Burgos, and Zamora, the family names of the Roman Catholic Filipino diocesan (secular) priests who were executed by garrote on Feb. 17, 1872, by the Spanish colonial authorities. At the time of their execution, Mariano Gomes (Dante Rivero) was 73, José Burgos (Cedrick Juan) was 35, and Jacinto Zamora (Enchong Dee) was 37. All had taken advanced studies at the University of Santo Tomas, with Burgos on his second doctorate. These were intellectuals, mind you. Piolo Pascual plays Padre Pedro Peláez, Burgos’ mentor, who would die in an earthquake.

The movie shows the three Filipino clerics (indios but with some Spanish blood running in them) questioning the frailes’ planned takeover of the parishes run by secular priests like them. These Spanish friars with questionable motives belong to a religious order. Rightly or wrongly, the three soon find themselves accused of involvement in the Cavite Mutiny. With false witnesses, the plot thickens.

For perspective, I turned to the fifth volume (Reform and Revolution) of the 10-volume “Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People.” The chapter “Gomburza” was written by best-selling author-historian Ambeth Ocampo (of the “Looking Back” column next page). Vignettes from Ocampo’s chapter have made it to the movie including details such as Gomes’ last words and Burgos’ defiance before the garrote silences them for good. But their deaths are not for naught, as the movie would show. (According to Ocampo, people took fragments of the priests’ cassocks for safekeeping and other purposes.)

At the execution is the cameo appearance of an 11-year-old Pepe (Khalil Ramos), Jose Rizal in the making, with his elder brother Paciano who had been under Burgos’ mentorship. Pepe’s apocryphal presence (artistic license, okay?) does lead to a historical fact highlighted in the movie—Rizal dedicating his second novel “El Filibusterismo” to the three priests. Their martyrdom also fuels the rising rage against the Spanish colonizers.

“GomBurZa” is the only Filipino movie I have seen where most of the spoken parts are in Spanish, lending authenticity to dialogues. My 24 units of Spanish helped but so did the translations in large fonts. I was impressed by how the actors delivered the long speaking parts, even the expletives, in Spanish. Bravo!

Production design was superb but I wished for more bucolic outdoor scenes as the movie could make one feel somewhat claustrophobic because of the indoor happenings in darkened rooms. Well, there are a lot of talkies in those rooms as when dissidents, insurrectos, indios, and the like plot their moves. The prison cells are dark and damp, but of course.

As the movie unfolds, one could say that all three are wrongly accused and sentenced, Zamora especially, and do not deserve to die in that manner. Heartrending is the Spanish Archbishop Melitón Martinez (Jaime Fabregas) plea to the authorities that the convicts not be stripped of their priestly garments because they are “going to die as priests.” And so each one goes up to the scaffold with his cassock on. When the defiant Burgos shouts to declare his innocence for the last time, the friar who holds him down could only say, “Even Christ was innocent.” Duh! Here at last is an outdoor setting where townspeople witness the killings by strangulation. The garrote scenes are not for the faint of heart, one as revolting and brutal as the next. You could almost hear the neck bone crack. I did not blink.

The Gomburza statue (by sculptor Solomon Saprid) of the three priests dying by garrote, now stands along Burgos St. across the National Museum. A marker in Rizal Park indicates where they were executed. Their graves are in Paco Park in Manila.

More than two decades later in the movie, on Dec. 30, 1896, Rizal, too, would be executed, but by a firing squad on the same Bagumbayan field, in a way more cinematic, choreographed, and photographed in real life so that it is now deeply etched in the nation’s memory. Lest we say the rest is history, poet Rafael Zulueta da Costa comes to mind: “Not yet, Rizal, not yet.”

“GomBurZa” had fanned the flames.

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